When I first got the canning bug way back in September I would spend many productive hours at work staring at pictures of other people’s canned goods on Flickr. (Yes, I’m just that cool.) One of the first recipes I stumbled across that I simply had to make, then, was this one for Minneola Old Fashioned Marmalade. It seemed like just the sort of thing that the newer, better, canning me should be able to offer with afternoon tea and crumpets.

This past weekend I finally had a clear canning schedule, so old fashioned marmalade was a go.

I’ve never actually eaten marmalade (that I know of), so didn’t think very hard about what kind of process would be involved in making it. I immediately learned one thing: getting all the pith off the peels sucks. I’m sure there are far more efficient processes to do this than what I’d come up with, but that’s of no use to the me on Saturday morning who feared she’d have horrible, hooked claw hands for the rest of her life. The pain was quickly forgotten, though, because this recipe isn’t about olde-tyme marmalade — it’s about old fashioned cocktail marmalade, so I got to use my newest, favorite ingredient.

Homemade bitters! I had three types to choose from, all bottled in the last week or so, and opted for the figgy-orange ones. They are precious and delicious and I jealously guard them, but I’m very pleased to report that this marmalade recipe was good enough to justify using the dear, dear bitters in.

The whole thing is so simple and also so genius. It’s sort of the standard marmalade, made out of Honeybell tangelos, with an addition of vanilla bean, rye and bitters. It’s like where orange gumdrops meet my favorite cocktail, only something you can spread on toast.

And I even got to try out one of the fancy German jars Santa brought me for Christmas. I’m just in love with how pretty this whole recipe experience ended up being. And to top it all off, for the three regular Ball mason jars we got along with that one Weck one, Pookie made perhaps her greatest label yet.